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T O P I C R E V I E W

mark plas

I recently saw the movie Stowaway to the Moon again for the first time in I think 30 years. What struck me was the A7L-B suits they wore on the movie. They look so real. Anybody know if they used original Apollo gear on that movie?

mode1charlie

I haven't seen that movie since it first came out, but it made an impression and I tried to track it down a couple of years ago to no avail. Where did you find/see it?

(As for the suits, I have no idea but that would be interesting to know as well.)

p51

The movie is on YouTube, I watched the whole thing there. Should be easy to find.

I have to agree, those suits looked awfully good for a TV production...

space1

Thanks for the heads up on the YouTube link. That's the way the Visitor Center looked when I first visited KSC in 1973. I was 17 years old.

The suits looked good, but I really don't think they were real. The Command Module cockpit was very much not real. It had a few real items, though. I would say the Rotation Control and the Crewman Optical Alignment Sight (COAS) were actual hardware. And the LM cockpit was probably a high fidelity trainer. I also think the communication cabling was from a trainer.

It was nice seeing Pete Conrad in a cameo role.

p51

quote:Originally posted by space1:Thanks for the heads up on the YouTube link. That's the way the Visitor Center looked when I first visited KSC in 1973. I was 17 years old.

Happy to help. Someone else here noted it was on YouTube and I immediately scrambled to find it. I'd forgotten how annoying that kid really was. The movie was actually better put together than I expected (but not as authentic as I remembered seeing it as a kid, of course).

Best of all, it showed that visitor center as I first saw it as well (hadn't been there in years, and saw it with my parents last year, we spent the whole time trying to figure out where stuff had been when we saw it when I kid. I assume it occupies the same ground but clearly none of the buildings exist I remember from back then). The first time I saw the place it was 1975 when I was 5. It's easy to remember the year as the tour bus took right past one of the Viking landers sitting on pad 41, being readied for the launch that came very soon afterward...

mark plas

The suits sure looked better than From the Earth to the Moon or Apollo 13.

Remember this was shot in 1974 with a lot of Apollo hardware out there like training and backup suits.

If the CM replica was their standard the suits sure would have looked a lot worse if they were replicas.

moorouge

The suits were probably replicas. The manufacturers of the real ones (three per astronaut) also sold lesser examples for about $300 during the Apollo days. These consisted of only two layers.

There was an attempt to sell one of these replicas in the UK for £5000, claiming it was a training suit used by Aldrin. However, it turned out that it was merely an advertising stunt for an insulation firm.